A thousand steelhead on a fly in one season? Sounds impossible? Obviously, it is in today’s world, where we’ve inherited the gift that keeps on giving, that of prideful, reckless greed, which clearly now appears to be the signature legacy of the human race. On the masthead of our marauding vessel as it hisses through the foam and chop, the flag raised by a bare-breasted siren leaning into the wind should be emblazoned “Plunder it!”
But let’s go back in time, and not that far, really, a mere sixty years, when you would be fishing between the years of 1948 to about 1953. This means you had to have been born before 1930. Why the specificity of dates? Because you would alternately be fishing the Klamath, Eel, Russian, and Gualala Rivers just ahead of the tsunami of destruction. Too, you would need to be fishing with a shooting head, the new innovation developed in 1947 by Jimmy Green at the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in San Francisco —30 feet of fly line, backed by nylon monofilament running line. In the early years, the fly line would have been silk, largely replaced in the 1950s by Sunset’s Dacron. Prior to this, steelhead fly fishers used whole weight-forward fly lines. Experts such as the tournament caster Marvin Hedge, who developed his famous “Seven Taper” line, could make the long casts needed to fish the big rivers. But tournament casting is not fishing. In the former, you make a few powerhouse deliveries, and that’s it. But try making a 90-foot cast every minute for 12 solid hours, and it’s an impossibility.
Since we’re demonstrating potential, an extraordinary angler is required, which of course can only be Bill Schaadt. No one else in history could fish every single day from dark-thirty to dark-thirty, when conditions allowed, for seven months.
I am not a fiction writer. I saw, at least in part, everything talked about in this essay. Not only that, but as far as the Russian and Gualala Rivers are concerned, my parents and grandparents had owned a house at Villa Grande on the Russian since 1920, and the old-timers I met during the 1950s had stories going back 40 years. They also fished the Gualala in the 1920s. I have attempted to keep the averages conservative. And, of course, coastal fishing in any given year was totally governed by the amount of rainfall. The drier the year, the greater the catch.
The season could start as early as August on the Klamath, although both weather and water were far too warm. So let’s have Bill get there right after Labor Day for a four-week stay. September is still a hot month in California, so fishing would be best starting at dawn for three or four hours, finishing with three or four more until nightfall. As the month progressed, water temperatures would gradually drop, making it reasonable to fish all day. The Klamath had huge numbers of what are known as half-pounders, very small, immature steelhead from 12 to 15 inches. What they were doing there has never been explained to my satisfaction. But let’s not count these, of which you could catch 30 or 40 a day without breaking a sweat. Aside from these little guys, fall Klamath steelhead were small by coastal standards, about four to six pounds. You might get four or five of these a day, or as many as a dozen. Taking an average of six during Bill’s 30-day stay meant he caught 240 steelhead.
In the first week of October, the Eel beckons. Unlike the Klamath, the Eel has almost no flow in the late summer and early fall until the first rain changes that. You could wade any 25-foot-wide riffle without getting your knees wet. However, the pools are staggering, in some cases two hundred yards wide and a thousand yards long, telling you of the potential enormity of the rain-swelled river.
You would be fishing the lower pools, such as Fernbridge and Singley. You might hit a fluke as high up as the mouth of the Van Duzen, but mostly, fish will be reluctant to move upriver until it rains. The adventurous spirit would go below Singley out to Cock Robin Island.
The Eel, too, had a plethora of half-pounders, and if one wanted to fish for them, which some mysteriously did, you could easily catch as many or more than on the Klamath. Having started to come in on around the first of September, the king salmon would hang in the pools in dark masses the size of football fields, hundreds of thousands of fish poised to charge upstream the instant a surge of rain-induced rise would be felt. But we’re talking about steelhead.
The serious double-digit winter fish did in fact start trickling in as early as Labor Day, but now in October, they are coming with regularity. The legions would not come until late November or early December, when the river would be in spate, but there were plenty to fish for in late October. Some would move at night through the shallow riffles, making fishing viable for several pools above Fernbridge.
The catch would vary widely from day to day, with some yielding but two or three fish, while others might be three or even four times that. So let’s say the river blows out on November 15. Using an average of five fish a day (the limit, by the way) in 45 days, Bill caught 250 steelhead.
Once the Eel was out, it rarely, if ever, dropped back to fly-fishing conditions except on the South Fork. Time to go to the Russian. In the 1950s, some steelhead entered the lower river as early as the end of October. However, realistically speaking, the winter runs began in earnest in November. Perfect timing, because the rain that took out the Eel also raised the Russian, only far less severely. And in those days, it cleared relatively quickly, because it was undammed.
The season ran from December 1 through April 1, some 120 days. Given the vagaries of rainfall, even though the river cleared in seven or eight days after a big storm, let’s say Bill gets in 75 days. Early on, fish move easily from the mouth to Lone Pine, where some definition slows them down. However, you were still in tidewater here, the Austin Riffle being the unofficial end of it. So as fish moved in on what was essentially low water and in spite of a first raise, they piled up at Freezeout, Duncans Mills, Watson’s Log, and Brown’s Pool.
So now there is a situation where fish are holding temporarily. Let’s say you have a 10-day window before the next storm knocks it out on December 15, and Bill catches from 5 to 10 a day. If we average it out to 7 a day, he caught 70.
It takes four days for the Gualala to come into shape, and Bill is there on December 20. The first runs hit that river predictably year after year from December 13 to 17. Anglers are lined up, taking them on the outgoing tide at Mill Bend, in Minor and Thompsons. In a stroke of incredible luck, it doesn’t rain again until right after New Years. In those 10 prime days, Bill lands 80 steelhead, his best day 12 fish, his largest 16 pounds.
The Gualala was the crown jewel of the North Coast rivers. Razor-honed bait rollers such as my uncle, William Chatham, in the 1920s and 1930s, considered 15 fish a day routine, his best ever being 24.
Alan Curtis, who was raised on the river and was to become perhaps the second-greatest angler on the north coast after Bill, caught over two hundred on a fly in 1948, fishing only on weekends and holidays. Bill Schaadt’s banner day on the Gualala in 1951 was 33 fish, including the world record for California still in place today. Bill told me that when you could only get 6 or 7 a day, it was time to go home to the Russian.
In a normal year, whatever that may be, January would be a slow month for the fly fisher, because the water was apt to be high, even if fishable, and most of the fish were high in the systems, attending to spawning. Bill would search here and there by car anywhere from Guerneville to Cloverdale, some days catching 2 or 3 and fluking out to 6 or 7, so let’s say in 16 days, he caught about 60.
A good rainstorm in late January sets the stage for the steelhead to clear out of the spawning headwaters and start back to the sea. Let’s say it rains until the middle of February and the Gualala is the first to clear. Spent fish are in all the lower holes, ready to resume feeding. The season closes March 1, but there are 10 days left of ideal conditions, and Bill is there. Spent fish are extremely aggressive, because now they’re hungry, and Bill catches from 10 to 15 a day. Let’s say he lands 80.
The Russian is open all year, but if you caught a steelhead after March 1, you had to release it, even in those unenlightened times. Fly fishers were few in those days, and fewer still discovered the gold mine of the Austin Riffle. Every steelhead that went up the river, with the exception of those few that perished, stopped at least briefly at Austin Creek on the way out, and this exodus lasted at least six weeks. Let’s consider for a moment the extent of the steelhead population for the entire Russian River in the time frame we’re dealing with here. There were no studies or formal figures available. A polling of dozens of old-timers who’d spent their whole lives on the river generally guessed from three to five hundred thousand steelhead.
The season after the disastrous flood of 1955, the winter of 1956 and 1957, got almost no rain at all. In a mere 90 days, Bill Schaadt caught a thousand fish in the Russian alone. That season, game wardens checked in sixty thousand fish landed and killed when the limit was three fish a day. However, to the local meatpackers, as the fly anglers came to call them, the limit was merely a suggestion, because when the fishing was hot, they thought nothing of rotating their way home and back for two or three limits a day. Even with fluke numbers such as these, the Russian was in no danger of a noticeable reduction of its whole population. After all, during many wet seasons, the river could barely be fished at all. Later that year, the Department of Fish and Game released an announcement that the Russian River had a total run of fifty thousand steelhead, which is but one reason why that bureaucracy is so highly thought of today. Sometime in 1953 or 1954, I’d guess, Bob Weddell was learning to fly fish for steelhead. He would later become a good friend of mine and fishing partner to Bill before moving to Idaho for the duration. There was a fine old gentlemen who lived in Monte Rio named Howard George who sort of took Bob under his wing.
One March, he said, “Take the north bank road out of Monte Rio to Austin Creek. Park and walk to the mouth. You’ll see a nice gravel bar right above the mouth of the creek. Stand where you see my footprints. No need to step in the water at all. Cast straight out and let it swing.” Bob hooked 16 steelhead on 16 casts, went for three before the seventeenth and five before eighteenth, then reeled in, stunned.
My introduction to this bucket of all buckets came when I was 17. Shad were an exciting item on the river in those days, and I was itching to get after them. Stopping at King’s in Guerneville, I naively asked if anyone had caught any yet. It was only the first week of March, and the shad wouldn’t show up until at least April 1, but Grant said, “Try Austin Creek, if you want, but there’s nothing there but some old red steelhead.” Old red steelhead? What the hell did that mean? So I went down for a look-see.
Like Weddell before me, I stepped on the gravel bar and made a cast. Halfway through the swing, I was hooked up. Four hours later, I’d beached 8 or 10. In those days, I fished for something every single day, so naturally, I was back at dawn. Same thing — fish after fish until it tapered off about three o’clock. A week or 10 days into this, I was manic. Each day, several other fishermen came down, and I kept looking across the river at an empty beach. It was impossible to wade across the river, because it was too fast. Casini didn’t let anyone in over there except Bill, so I started parking down behind Watson’s Log on the secret little road where Bill used to hide his car. Then I waded the shallows and walked upstream, where for the next four or five weeks, I had that side of the river to myself.
Why the fishing held up so well in spite of any pressure was because you were fishing for different fish all the time. As the saying went, “There are fresh ones coming down every day.”
For the sake of variety, I tried every single fly pattern then in use. Everything worked equally well, so I began each night to see if I could tie a fly so ridiculous that a steelhead would not take it. I could not, and this was a lesson that only experience teaches, which is that day in and day out, fly design is far less important than where you put it.
Another verity began to take shape for me, as well, which is that the road of excess leads to the path of enlightenment. When fishing is slow and tough, everything is a fluke, and it is this that gives rise to the notion that steelhead are hard to catch. They damn well are when they’re not there.
In the years we’re dealing with in this exercise, Bill’s enthusiasm was running at a fever pitch, and a five-or-six-week gig at the Austin Riffle was worth 300 fish. However, since Bill used the fish he caught to barter for goods and services, after about 1960, he let it go because there was nothing to take home. Too, as the calamitous effects of the Coyote Dam began to dwindle the Russian’s stocks, those halcyon days faded into mere memory. But catch 300 steelhead from 8 to 15 pounds fishing every day for 40 or 40 straight days, and you have a good start on a comprehensive acquaintanceship with the species.
If we accept my averages, the abacus shows that Bill landed a bit above a thousand steelhead this season. In a low-water year, that figure could double. Of these, he killed only the legal limit each day. A citizen of our time might exclaim, “My god, this one man killed more steelhead in one season than all the fly fishers in California now catch in five years.”
Know this: catch-and-release is a pointless mantra in the conservation of migratory steelhead and salmon. Are fly fishers’ egos now so warped by the macho tone of tackle manufacturers’ advertisements that they can possibly imagine disaffecting an entire healthy population of steelhead with their pathetic little fish poles? If Bill Schaadt couldn’t, it’s certain you can’t. Of course we don’t have a healthy population, and are facing soon having none at all, so bop your one fish a season on the head with a length of driftwood and put it on the barbecue. It will be delicious, and it’s not going to make the slightest bit of difference.
Mark Twain said: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” But it’s all we have to fight the monsters among us. Worried about the ongoing decline of wild fish? Then put that obscenely expensive gear away and focus instead on jousting with bulldozers, cranes, chainsaws, cement trucks, and giant earthmovers, existing and proposed water diversions, dams (the building and removal of), 10-mile drift nets in flagrant violation of international law by pirate factory ships, feckless hatcheries, impostor biologists, scumbag politicians, and assorted other criminal types. Remember what the comic character Pogo said fifty or sixty years ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” In Iceland, where they’ve kept records for three hundred years, it’s been proven that a river with a run of four thousand Atlantic salmon can sustain a thousand fish taken per season, and each year, four thousand fish will return. That’s 25 percent of the run. If, as all the old-timers asserted, the Russian River had three to five hundred thousand steelhead in it, and sport fishermen killed seventy-five thousand each year, that’s 15 to 20 percent, depending on who you believe — Fish and Wildlife, who have napped their way through the millennium, or people who have spent sixty or seventy years eyes glued to the ball. If every single person killed every single sport-caught fish on the entire West Coast since Lewis and Clark came through, it would be impossible to wiggle the decimal point on species numbers. The authorities today systematically demonize the sport fishers, punishing them with preposterously stupid regulations, while the criminal spoilers order another drink, light up a cigar, and gouge another wound into our one and only planet. Then slaps on the back are in order from the corrupt, bought-off environmental police force.
Are you angry yet? If not, what are you thinking? Do you still believe as so many of us did fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, that our state commission, theoretically put in place as a protective agency, has been doing just that all this time? Well they haven’t. And if allowed to continue with business as usual, which is to sell out wild salmon and steelhead to the highest bidder, then the 99 percent loss suffered under their squinty eyes is inexorably headed toward flat-line zero.
The only possible hope for saving what little is left and moving on to ultimate restoration is to take the management of all salmonids out of their dirty hands. What’s needed is a science-driven commission that has the authority to stand on equal ground with both state and federal governments and that cannot be bought off by cheap-suit politicians or hormonally imbalanced, fiendishly greedy, undemocratic capitalists.
Those gleaming law-enforcement badges so proudly displayed are unfortunately pinned to black-hooded robes beneath which furtive cowards and frauds cringe out of sight in order to keep their unearned paychecks coming. We need an army of the concerned to rip those dark clown outfits off all the cowering intellectual midgets, spray them with holy water, and send them on a vast ship of their own far from landfall, where they can do no more harm as they drool for an eternity over their hands of solitaire. When the column of militia is lined up to head into battle, I’ll be proud to stand at the forefront and take the first bullet.
